The following are some of the most frequently asked questions we hear at the front desk. Hopefully, these answers will clarify any uncertainty you may have with the Library. Leave a comment below for any question we might have missed.

Q. Can I use the group study room for a phone interview?

A.The group study rooms (GSRs) are only for what the name suggests: group studying. Because there is a two-person minimum for GSRs, two people must be present with their Wildcards to check out a GSR. These rooms may be used for a maximum of two hours. For individual rooms set up for phone interviews, students can go to the Career Center in Garey Hall.

Q. Where is room 415?

A. Room 415 is a new classroom on the library’s 4th floor. When you enter the building, turn right and take the stairwell to the 4th floor. When you exit the stairwell on the 4th floor, turn right. Room 415 replaced University Archives, which was subsequently moved to the ground floor.

Q. Do you have the textbook for my class?

A. The Library does not purchase textbooks for current courses unless specifically ordered by faculty or a librarian deems a book as important to the collection. Cost and space are the main reasons the Library does not buy the assigned textbook for every class. Sometimes, though, a professor puts their personal copy on reserve, but students would not be allowed to take this book out of the Library.

Q. The Library does not have the book I am looking for; is there anything else I can do?

A. You have a couple of options for books that we do not own or that are currently checked out:

- Check Rosemont College’s library- Considered our “sister” school, Rosemont allows Villanova students to use its library as if they were students there.

- Villanova belongs to a group called TCLC which grants students the privilege to borrow books from members in the group. Click here for more information.

Q. I have a $103 fine on my account for an overdue book. Do I have to pay the entire amount?

A. The book you have borrowed is so overdue that our library system assumes that the book is lost. Overdue fines have stopped accruing at $3 and a $100 lost-item-replacement fee has been assessed. If you return the book, the $100 fee is waived, but you still have to pay the $3 overdue fine.

Q. How does the print quota work?

A. Full time students are allotted $60 towards printing while part time students get $20. This allotment is for the entire year, resetting in the summer. If you are running low, students can go to the Wildcard Office to add more funds. After this allotment is depleted, print jobs will automatically start to draw from the Novabucks on your Wildcard.

Q. How many books can I check out, and how long can I have them for?

A. The number of books and length of time you have them for are all dependent on your status; luckily this handy chart breaks it down.

FAQs at the Desk by Raamaan McBride, writer on the Communication and Service Promotion team and specialist on the Access Services team.

Falvey Memorial Library is fortunate to be able to provide access to hundreds of instructional databases for the Villanova Community. While the choices may be vast, each searchable collection presents a unique treasure trove of information. Today, in commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we’d like to direct your attention to a uniquely browsable resource, the Oxford African American Studies Center. Touted as “the online authority on the African American Experience,” the Oxford AASC provides a wide array of primary source documents, educational resources and articles, and multimedia.

The database provides students, scholars and librarians with online access to the finest reference resources in African American studies. At its core, AASC features the new Encyclopedia of African American History: 1619-1895, Black Women in America, the highly acclaimed Africana, a five-volume history of the African and African American experience, and the African American National Biography project (estimated at 8 volumes). In addition to these major reference works, AASC offers other key resources from Oxford’s reference program, including the Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature and selected articles from other reference works.

Feel free to contact a librarian if you’d like further help exploring and utilizing any of Falvey Memorial Library’s databases.

I’m Michelle Callaghan, a first-year graduate student at Villanova University. This is our new column, “‘Cat in the Stacks.” I’m the ‘cat. Falvey Memorial Library is the stacks. I’ll be posting about living that scholarly life, from research to study habits to embracing your inner-geek, and how the library community might aid you in all of it.

It’s spring semester! Break was fantastic, right? Exactly what you needed? Me too. Among the hundreds of reasons recesses rule—Christmas cookies and sleeping in ranking first and second, of course—is using the Internet for procrastifun™ again and not having to feel guilty about it.

Have you ever visited the Internet Archive? Be careful you don’t get lost forever. I’ve used the archive for a few classes so far, once to find really obscure scans of a folklore journal from the 1800s, and very frequently to listen to the Ulysses audiobook (Dear Ulysses audiobook, you are the real MVP of last semester, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, you darling, sweet child).

But I’m starting to use it for fun—admittedly when I should probably be doing other things—because so much is archived on this site and it blows my mind. Their tagline, “Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, and more,” is an undersell.

The archive got a lot of attention in tech and gaming circles recently for hosting an archive of MS-DOS games (they also host libraries of classic arcade and console games). I just revisited the classic Aladdin game and while I failed miserably, I failed in a nice, nostalgic way. Lemmings is next on the list—or maybe Oregon Trail.

I also browsed a collection of sheet music and found a user-uploaded Avatar (The Last Airbender, not the blue cat people)medley, a whole medley—not a preview—for free use. Looks like I’m going to have to brush up on piano again.

I’d say if you’re not looking for anything in particular, scroll to the “Top Collections at the Archive” at the bottom of the homepage and just poke around. Today, my poking around has led me to a collection of video game speedruns. And, oh no, my weakness: live music performances.

The coolest part of this choice of procrastifun is you might easily stumble upon something really useful for research. Honestly, if you’re going to procrastinate on schoolwork, you might as well put yourself in the same general region of actual research, right? It’s a big step up from the Robot Unicorn Attack tournaments I had on Facebook as an undergrad, right?

… I’ll keep telling myself that.

Article by Michelle Callaghan, graduate assistant on the Communication and Service Promotion team. She is currently pursuing her MA in English at Villanova University.

Winter is coming. No, seriously. I’m not just quoting the motto of House Stark from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. Winter is really coming and, to many of us, that means getting out the wool blankets, scouring online stores for the most fashionable wool clothing, and getting ready for the holiday shopping season. However, many of us perhaps aren’t aware that the wool industry is an inhumane one and that buying wool directly contributes to the suffering of sheep. Please join me and millions around the globe by participating in #WoolFreeWinter (warning: some viewers may find the content upsetting).

A: As first reported by NBC, eyewitness investigations into the wool industry led by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) revealed the horrific conditions under which sheep are raised and sheared in the United States and Australia, the world’s biggest wool exporter. As a result of this international exposé, PETA initiated the campaign #WoolFreeWinter to educate the public about this cruel industry and to raise awareness about ethical alternatives to wool before the winter season.

Q: But don’t sheep need to be shorn?

A: Unlike wild sheep, which naturally shed their wool, domesticated sheep have been bred for increased wool growth and do need to be shorn. While this industry sounds humane theoretically, it is, in reality, a nightmare.

Undercover investigators found that sheep were killed, mutilated, stomped upon and brutally beaten during the shearing process. These acts occur because shearers are paid by volume, not by the hour.

An experienced shearer can “handle” more than 350 sheep a day over a four week period. Shearing sheep as quickly as possible for profit inevitably leads to a disregard for their wellbeing.

A sheep’s skin is quite wrinkly because it is maximized for wool growth, but it also collects moisture making it prone to infection. Flies are attracted to this moisture and lay eggs in the folds of skin (flystrike), leaving fly larvae (maggots) to nest and then eat the sheep alive. In the wool industry, a barbaric operation called “mulesing” is performed to prevent this condition, during which strips of flesh are cut from a lamb’s back and buttocks to create scar tissue that won’t collect moisture. However, this procedure is not always effective. Mulesing, in addition to castration, dehorning, and tail docking, is often performed without anesthetics, and infections from these mutilations can lead to a slow and agonizing death. Once sheep cease to produce quality wool, they are then shipped worldwide in overcrowded, multilevel ships to slaughterhouses without concern for their welfare.

Q: What can I do?

A: The best thing you can do is to not buy wool products. Check clothing labels and, if an item includes wool, put it back on the shelf. Wool may also be listed as mohair, pashmina, shahtoosh, or cashmere, but any kind of wool amounts to animal suffering.

A: While PETA states that “there is no such thing as humane wool,” wool suppliers have taken significant steps to establish more humane wool practices since PETA’s initial investigations into the industry, which caused widespread protest and millions of dollars in company losses. If you would still prefer wool clothing, be sure to enquire of the retailer whether their products are ethically sourced. The Merino Company, (http://www.merinocompany.com/index.asp), New Merino (http://newmerino.com.au/wp/brand-owners/mulesing/), and Plevna Downs (http://www.plevnadowns.com.au/index.htm) are three companies that pride themselves on supplying non-mulesed wool to numerous brands and retailers. Humane companies like these usually undergo auditing, on-site veterinarian evaluations, and something called a traceability, traceback, or “Sheep to Shelf” system, so that one can identify the growers (or even the individual sheep themselves!) who produced the wool. It might also be worth investigating smaller farms, societies, and organizations in your area that shear sheep as a heartfelt hobby and create only small amounts of wool products for limited distribution.

Q: What are the alternatives to wool?

Alternatives to wool include cotton, cotton flannel, hemp, bamboo, polyester fleece and other cruelty-free fibers. Two other options include Tencel, a new durable and biodegradable substitute, and Polartec Wind Pro, which is made from recycled plastic bottles and offers four times the wind resistance of wool. Check out PETA’s cruelty-free shopping guide for revealing information about the fashion industry and ethical alternatives to animal products.

By choosing an alternative, you will not only directly help the lives of sheep but also avoid the common problems with wool: prone to retaining unpleasant odors, open to moth and mildew damage, not very durable, expensive, difficult to clean, able to shrink and stain easily, very itchy and/or can cause allergies.

The Illustrated London News’s illustration of the Christmas Truce: “British and German Soldiers Arm-in-Arm Exchanging Headgear: A Christmas Truce between Opposing Trenches”

In December 1914 conditions for soldiers on both sides of No Man’s Land in Flanders were dreadful – water logged trenches, mud, cold rain, and dead bodies in various states of decomposition lying unburied in the land between the lines. Out of this misery came the Christmas Truce, a truce that evolved from the lower ranks upward. Earlier, Pope Benedict XV had asked for a Christmas cease-fire, but both sides rejected his request.

Both the German and English troops had received Christmas packages, some from families and friends and others, official gifts from their governments. The English soldiers received “Princess Mary boxes”: metal boxes engraved with an outline of the princess, daughter of King George V. These gift containers were filled with butterscotch and chocolate, tobacco (cigarettes for the soldiers and cigars for officers), a picture of Princess Mary and a greeting from King George V, “May God protect you and bring you safely home.” Germans received their gifts from Kaiser Wilhelm II. Each soldier received a meerschaum pipe and their officers received cigars. The German troops were also given small Christmas pine trees with candles and decorations. And by Christmas Eve the rain had stopped and skies were clear.

Thus a sense of goodwill had spread through the trenches by Christmas Eve (and Weintraub, p. 3, explains, “… the ordinary British soldier had no strong feelings about fighting the Germans …”); in one area Germans sent a chocolate cake to the nearby English soldiers, accompanied by a request for a truce so that the Germans could celebrate their captain’s birthday. They planned a concert for that evening and would place candle-lighted trees on the parapets of their trenches. The English accepted the German proposal and offered tobacco as a gift. At 7:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve the Germans began to sing; both sides applauded each song and the English were invited to join the Germans in singing.

On Christmas Eve at Lille the British Royal Flying Corps flew over the German airfield and dropped a well-padded Christmas pudding. The following day, a German pilot bombed the English with a bottle of rum.

On Christmas day, soldiers exchanged newspapers, cigars and cigarettes; held joint religious services in No Man’s Land; buried their dead; and talked to each other in English and broken English (few English soldiers spoke German, but many of the Germans spoke at least some English, having worked in England before the war). Soldiers exchanged food, sang, took photographs of each other and played soccer. They also drained and repaired the trenches, repaired wire entanglements and brought ammunition and other supplies to their front lines.

On the day after Christmas, Boxing Day in England and St. Stephen’s Day for the Germans, some areas continued to observe a truce, but generally hostilities were reluctantly resumed. The war, which both sides had expected to be brief, continued into 1918. There were no more Christmas truces. But for one short time there was “Peace on earth and good will toward men.” Today, a wooden cross set in a concrete base surrounded by poppies that bloom in season commemorates the Christmas Truce.

On December 12, 2014, the Duke of Cambridge attended an English dedication ceremony for a monument to the Christmas Truce. The monument is located in the National Memorial Arboretum, a 150 acre site in Alrewas, Staffordshire. The memorial is funded by the Football Remembers partners; it is part of a series of events being held in December.

I’m Michelle Callaghan, a first-year graduate student at Villanova University. This is our new column, “‘Cat in the Stacks.” I’m the ‘cat. Falvey Memorial Library is the stacks. I’ll be posting about living that scholarly life, from research to study habits to embracing your inner-geek, and how the library community might aid you in all of it.

Shortly before Thanksgiving break, I took out two books from Falvey—the first books I’ve taken out from our library all semester. I guess that’s not super scandalous; I’ve been busy reading the books I actually bought for the semester, and I’ve mostly used online databases for journal articles for all my supplementary research. Now that it’s paper-writing time, I went for a swim in the stacks.

But this is kind of scandalous: as an undergraduate English major, I never took a book out of the library.

Not once.

If you’re cringing, I’m sorry. But if you’re embarrassed for me, don’t be. I did very well.

Still, even though I didn’t use the library in the traditional sense, every single resource I used was provided to me through the library—library subscriptions, interlibrary loans.

But I don’t advocate a life without the stacks! My stacks aversion meant I did five times more work than I actually had to by draining databases dry instead of checking out dozens of relevant books. And I missed out on so many incredible research avenues because I was too, what, lazy? Afraid of asking a librarian for help?

Why didn’t I browse the stacks? I had all sorts of excuses.

Wah, it’s outdated, wah! It’s not. I just took a book out about digital culture in World of Warcraft. This isn’t grandma’s local library.

Wah, it’s hard! It’s not. Falvey’s online catalog even has maps. The circulation desk has signs to point you where you go about checking out and returning materials and your Wildcard does the rest. I’m partially allergic to approaching Front Desks, and I survived.

But I did! just took out three awesome books on video games (and if you want them, too bad. You’ll have to wait until the end of January because I’m doing super important research. But then I promise I will stop monopolizing the video game holdings. Maybe.)

Article by Michelle Callaghan, graduate assistant on the Communication and Service Promotion team. She is currently pursuing her MA in English at Villanova University.

So, what is a patron saint? The New Catholic Encyclopedia says that “saints came to be regarded as the special advocates and intercessors.” Sacred places, solemn events, and even causes and occupations have, over the years, become associated with a particular patron or patroness. Therefore a patron saint, who is very much alive in heaven, is called upon to be an advocate and asked to pray for us here on earth, particularly on certain occasions.

Saint Gianna Beretta Molla (1922-1962)

Saint Gianna was a twentieth-century Italian doctor and also a mother. She risked her life for the sake of her unborn child, and died in 1962, rather than terminating the pregnancy in an effort to save her own life. She is a martyr, which is a witness, to the importance of respecting life from conception to natural death. Her husband and children attended her canonization ceremony in 2004. She has become the patroness of mothers, unborn children, healthcare workers, professional women, and the pro-life movement.

For more information about the World Meeting of Families 2015 in Philadelphia, visit the official website.

Are you confused by the different formats required by Chicago-style for footnotes and bibliographies? Are you unsure about how and when to use “ibid.”? – Answers to your questions are just around the corner.

Come to Falvey Memorial Library for a quick introduction to Chicago-style rules for footnotes and bibliography. Sessions will be held in Falvey 204 in the second-floor Learning Commons. For more information, contact history liaison librarian Jutta Seibert (jutta.seibert@villanova.edu).